Seeing is believing when it comes to major masterpieces

In a classic television ad that first aired in 1971, a tape recording of Ella Fitzgerald shattered a glass when the singer hit a high note.

"Is it live, or is it Memorex?" went the slogan. The suggestion, of course, was that a high-quality reproduction can be as good as the real thing.

A purist would scoff. No recording could be as good as a live concert. But if that's true for music, it's doubly true for art.

"Imagine all the incredible travel videos about Chartres Cathedral," said James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "You get an awful lot of information. Does anyone for a second think that that would provide an experience equal to standing in the nave of Chartres as the sun comes up behind the [stained glass] windows?"

He might have answered his rhetorical question by shouting "No!" into the phone, but Wood was too polite for that.

In a high-tech age that celebrates the virtual reality of computers, video games and Hollywood special effects, art museums have become more important than ever as temples of authenticity. A museum is a place not just to learn what separates originals from reproductions, but to learn how to see, period.

"We are a prime place to experience and hone your visual literacy, to compare all your experiences of art with a real thing at a real place in a real moment of time," Wood said.

This is not to say Wood dislikes reproductions. His museum sells thousands of them. But he believes that the more an artwork is reproduced, the more it fuels a desire to see the real thing.

The experience

of seeing the real thing

Wood's view, widely shared by his colleagues around the world, helps explain why millions of people make pilgrimages every year to see great masterpieces that have been reproduced ad nauseam, such as da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," or Botticelli's "Primavera."

The global tourism fueled by art is a profound rebuttal to the pessimistic theories of Walter Benjamin, a pre-World War II Viennese cultural critic who feared that originals would lose their authority in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Somehow, great artworks always come out on top. They always overcome the accumulated memories of all their reproductions.

When you're standing in front of the original, you always see more than you could in a photomechanical copy. Proof lies in the pleasant jolt that comes when you first encounter a painting or sculpture you've seen a zillion times in reproductions. Call it the shock of the real.

"I don't think you can ever have that same response to a painting based on information from a reproduction," said Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. "It can't touch you. It can't pull you in."

In the presence of an actual masterpiece, you see brushstrokes that convey the artist's touch. You see where pigment is thick or thin. You might see fragments of drawing underneath the paint surface. Or you might see where the artist had second thoughts, scratched something out and started over again. Plus you see an artist's true colors, not an approximation squeezed through a printing press.

In contrast, looking at a reproduction "is like shaking hands with gloves on," said Katharine Reid, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Skeptics dismiss such statements as elitist. Sociologist Charles Murray wrote in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal that it's possible to make low-cost copies so perfect "that the most acute and best-trained artistic eye in the world would have only a 50-50 chance of picking the original over the copy."

He suggested the only thing that keeps museums and collectors from making such copies is social pressure, plus a fear of giving up on the monopoly status of originals.

As evidence, Murray cited the invective earned by Nelson Rockefeller 30 years ago, when he tried selling high-quality reproductions of artworks in his personal collection.

But Wood dismisses the idea that a reproduction, no matter how good, ever could rival an original. Sometimes, in the case of photography, a high-quality print in a book can come close. But with paintings or sculptures? Never.

Masterpieces

at our doorstep

The trick in experiencing the power of originals is to go to an art museum in a mood to concentrate. One strategy recommended by curators is to spend time in front of one or two artworks, rather than walking through a gallery or a whole museum as if taking inventory.

"I've often thought it would be great to carve over the door to the museum, 'come in and slow down,' " Wood said.

Fortunately, Clevelanders don't have to travel far to experience the jolt produced by great masterpieces.

An archipelago of fantastic art museums, packed with some of the greatest treasures on the planet, lies within a six-hour driving radius. Cleveland, after all, is almost precisely halfway between Chicago and Washington, D.C.

A short list of world-famous masterpieces within that charmed circle would have to include J.M.W. Turner's "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Winslow Homer's "Snap the Whip," at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, also would make the list.

So would Arshile Gorky's surreal and colorful abstraction, "The Liver Is the Cock's Comb," at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.

And this summer, as if to underscore the importance of seeing masterpieces up close and in person, the Art Institute of Chicago is devoting an entire exhibition to the making of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on la Grande Jatte."

So go ahead. Make a pilgrimage to see a masterpiece. And when you're standing in front of it, look closely. You'll experience perceptions you never could get from a printed page.

And when you leave the museum, you might see the world, however briefly, through the sensibility of the artist, whether it's Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso or J.M.W. Turner.

"Seeing through the eyes of the artist, that's one of the great pleasures and justifications of a museum in today's world," Wood said. "It teaches us how to look."